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by PhryneFicathon, TeaandBanjo



Category: Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries
Genre: 1927, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-23
Updated: 2018-01-26
Packaged: 2019-03-04 23:55:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 3,690
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13375770
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PhryneFicathon/pseuds/PhryneFicathon, https://archiveofourown.org/users/TeaandBanjo/pseuds/TeaandBanjo
Summary: Sometimes, leadership takes you to strange places.  Jack just found one.  He's not comfortable here, but he can't delegate this.Sometimes, a man has to put it all on the line.  Like right now:  there is something he needs to explain to Rosie.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Sarahtoo](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sarahtoo/gifts).



> Thanks to OllyJay and SolitaryCyclist for their support, encouragement, and beta reading. This isn’t exactly the story I set out to write, but I’m really glad it ended up as this story, the way you are reading it now.

The clerk looked up from his task as the two entered the front door of the hotel. The man of the pair was wearing a hat and an overcoat covering a dark suit. His eyes scanned the empty lobby. The lady sported an expensive looking but conservative hat, a plain, tasteful coat over a simple gray dress. 

"May I help you?" The clerk, now that he had a closer look at the pair, felt slightly uneasy. The clerk had seen a few policemen, quite a few, actually. This man showed several of the signs.

"We would like to take a room," said the man. 

"Of course." The clerk said all the things he always said, and the gentleman paid in cash, the way they always did.

He slid the register across the counter, and watched as the man removed his glove and scratched their name, address across the lines of the book.

When he pulled it back, he read "Mr. and Mrs. Robinson" with an address in Ballarat. It was an interesting change from "Jones" and "Smith" that filled most of the rest of the page.

"I need to see your ring, Miss." The man's face twitched.

The woman stood up even straighter as she removed her left glove. "That's Mrs.," she said sternly, in a voice that made him wonder if SHE was a cop. Which was completely ridiculous.

He pushed a key across the desk. "That's room 207, second floor, third room on the right, enjoy your stay."

The grim-faced man accepted the key, escorted the woman across the lobby with his gloved left hand at the small of her back. Her bearing was dignified, even a little distant. Not the usual giggling, too-close, can't wait to get you alone of the "girlfriend".

The desk clerk checked the time. He was off in 45 minutes. Checking on room 207 was not, strictly speaking, his responsibility, but if jacks were showing up unannounced, the manager needed to know about it. On the other hand, maybe this one had a lady on the side... in which case, he was sure that a jack's money was just as good as anyone else's.

*****

Room 207 was not large, and not cheery, or even well lit. The summer heat and humidity did not add to the experience. The wallpaper was probably pre-War, and...

Jack closed the door behind them, and, same as always, took her coat and hat. He opened a small wardrobe, hung her things, and hung his neatly beside them on the bar.

She sank into the single upholstered chair, and felt the full awkwardness of the situation. The two of them hadn't slept in the same bed for almost a year now. _Why did she go along with this?_ On the wall, a sentimental engraving of a pair of teenagers sharing a book of poetry mocked her.

*****

The lunch rush was winding down at the restaurant. The low background of voices chatting across the tables had dropped below the rattle of dishes and forks being cleared away, with an occasional complaint or oath from the direction of the kitchen.

Their plates had been removed, along with almost everything else from the table.

"Has there been anyone else, Jack?" Rosie instantly wanted to take that back. _She left. What was going to stop him?_

She watched the color rise in his face, his expression solemn. "No one else is you, Rosie." He examined his wine glass.

"Jack?" He looked up at her. "I miss you too," she whispered. Well, late nights under the covers, anyway. She didn't miss the arguments that ended with her not talking for days.

The waiter had returned with coffee and Rosie ordered a ridiculous desert, just like the last time. 

She and Jack quietly messed with the coffee, until the waiter returned with her pavlova, and centered it in front of her with a flourish. He added a small fork, next to her right hand.

She sipped her coffee, picked up her fork, and took a careful, ladylike bite of the thing on the plate. It was delicious, and perfectly constructed, in an architectural sense. The next sip of coffee erased the sweetness, and she took another bite. Honestly, it was enough.

"It's lovely," she said to Jack, placing the fork on the plate, "but it is too much. Would you like to try it?"

She pushed the plate halfway across the table, and took another sip of coffee, holding the cup to hide her smile. Jack was going to do a magic trick. In all their years of marriage, she had never told him about the trick. He didn't know it happened, and she was worried he would try to explain it and it would go away. Or maybe he would just stop letting her pick out dessert. _Rosie,_ she asked herself, _why are you worried about this? You want to end it._

Things changed size when Jack picked them up. The perfectly ordinary small dessert fork seemed to shrink as his hand approached. He completely failed to notice it happen. She smiled behind her cup.

Jack's idea of a reasonable sized bite differed from Rosie's but he nodded agreement that the dessert was delicious. The rest of the confection rapidly collapsed under assault from the now tiny dessert fork.

The miniature fork stopped in mid-air.

Jack's eyes were focused somewhere in the distance, and a very pronounced smirk had taken over his face.

"C'mon Jack, share the joke!" Rosie took another sip of her coffee.

He put the fork down (it returned to its usual size), and looked at her again.

"Well, it's like this. There's a hotel, about two blocks away." He gestured vaguely. "Not a nice hotel, mind you. They have a lot of lunchtime adultery traffic, get busted by vice occasionally, and somehow get away with it. Someone is getting paid off, but that’s not important."

"It just occurred to me that we could go check in, perfectly truthfully and legally, as ‘Mr. and Mrs. Robinson…’

"...and the clerk would assume we weren't?" finished Rosie. "And also assume we were there for one thing."

"Which is perfectly legal and proper for actual Mr. and Mrs. Robinson." He snickered.

She couldn't think of how to answer that one. Another sip of coffee, a long pause. A terrible nostalgia seized her. 

_The flat they shared was always cold, in the Australian winter of 1914. The window in the tiny bedroom faced south, and sometimes, she would wake up to watch Jack undoing the brass buttons of his uniform in the blue light of the early morning._

_As he slid the union suit down past hips and thighs, he noticed her peeking past the edge of the bed covers. She got to watch his expression go from tired, to surprised, to a smile that seemed to light him up._

_The laundry and the laundry hamper forgotten, he slid under the covers to join her._

_Not that much later, it was warm enough that the covers got kicked to the floor._


	2. Chapter 2

He crouched in front of the chair, resting one hand on her knee, inching up her skirt and her slip up until his fingers were brushing her stocking. "Mrs. Robinson," he smiled, stroking her knee gently, as the other hand slid under the other side of her skirt. "Is there something you want that you aren't getting at home?"

Rosie felt her pulse quicken, and heat grow between her thighs. The tips of his fingers slid past the top of her stockings, and she couldn't find the words to explain what she wanted, and how badly she wanted it.

He watched her face carefully. "Lady, may I lie in your lap?" Velvet, purring voice, and his eyes dropped to the seam of her knickers.

"Jack, please!" she whispered. He was quoting Shakespeare again. 

Hands reached up to her hips, and he pulled her to the edge of the chair. He shifted her carefully to pull down first one side of her knickers, then the other, and then the wisp of silk was free to slide down her legs and over her shoes.

"I mean, with my head upon your lap," he continued, his cheek warm on her thigh.

Two minutes later, according to her estimate, she was slumped back in the chair, trying to catch her breath and feeling the last tremors of a climax.

_Why had she agreed to this?_ The meeting with the solicitor was next Wednesday, and she'd finally decided that this marriage needed to be over. It was time to end things with Jack, who could frustrate her terribly, or make her rage for days, or, in five minutes get her knickers off and bring her to orgasm, before he'd even bothered to take off his tie. She had been trying to tell herself there was another man for her somewhere, but where was she going to find that? _Why did I agree to be alone with the wrong man again?_

The view of the picture was blocked by Jack, who had spent his time removing jacket, vest, tie and cufflinks. The curl of his hair was starting to establish itself again, and the cuffs were falling away from bare forearms, just enough to cue her treacherous brain to fill in the rest of the picture. _Oh, that is why._

"Rosie?" His hand brushed her cheek. "Why are you crying?"

"I'm going to meet with father's solicitor about starting divorce proceedings." She took a deep breath, which didn't seem to help release the tight feeling in her chest. "I need to do it, I've been trying to be determined about it, but it's going to hurt to give you up."

Jack blinked twice, handed her his handkerchief, and looked away.

...

Jack had the sudden feeling of pieces sliding into place. Rosie's sister not putting phone calls through to her. Meetings cancelled with Deputy Commissioner Sanderson, and a few other things that had been making Jack vaguely uneasy. _Now it makes sense._ There was the pattern, the one he expected, where her family came together and finished the job of shutting him out. Obviously (now) the lot of them had been trying to avoid tipping him off.

He wondered if the knowledge of the fact was going to hurt more than the suspicion and the expectation. A problem for later.

There were more immediate problems to solve. Rosie was upset, and there seemed to be more to it, and why had she agreed to a bad joke and a sleazy hotel room? 

"Were you planning to tell me this today?" He hadn't managed to keep his voice level.

"No. Father said let it be until we had the paperwork started." Rosie straightened up in the chair, and pushed her skirt back down. Her brown eyes caught his, then flicked away to focus somewhere else.

"Did he know you were going to meet me?" He addressed the question to a picture on the wall, and shoved his hands in his pockets. _Who takes a big, heavy, expensive book and sets it down on a rock?_

"I didn't mention it, you and I had already planned it."

"You could have cancelled." He faced her again, and took his hands back out of the pockets. 

"I wanted to see you." She stood up from the chair. "Please, Jack. Sit down, and stop pacing!"

He sat, covered his face with his hands. 

"Why did you agree to the hotel room?"

Rosie sighed. He reached for the hand that wasn't mangling his now-damp handkerchief.

He looked up at her. "Did you think I wouldn't take no for an answer?"

"It's not that. Never that. You are always a perfect gentleman." She was sniffling again, and he couldn't stop himself from pulling her onto his lap and putting his arms around her.

"I made a joke. Well, not really a good one. Why did you go along with it?" _Damn it, this is my fault, not hers._

"It reminded me about the two of us. Back when it was just us, and we were happy." 

"So, here we are, checked into a sleazy hotel room." His head was spinning. _Is she here to tell me about the divorce, or for a last chance at my wedding tackle?_

“What did you want to accomplish?” Jack was hoping this wasn't going to turn into an interrogation, because that was how he was starting to sound to himself. ”What do you want from me?”

Rosie sniffled into Jack's handkerchief, and he bit his tongue and waited for her to form an answer.

_Jack was always so direct_ , thought Rosie. Sometimes it made for uncomfortable conversations at social events, but sometimes it let him get to the essence of a problem. It was a necessary skill for a soldier or a policeman, not so much for a lady... What WAS the ladylike solution to what was bothering her? Or had she stepped too far out of that role, here in a strange hotel room, with a man who would be even more of a stranger as a divorce case progressed?

"I like sex, Jack."

His eyebrows lifted in surprise. "I had a feeling that you might, although that's the first time I've heard you say it." He brushed fingers down her back.

"I mean... with you." She slid a little closer.

Jack nodded. "Likewise." His mouth smirked, but his eyes were saying something else.

"What if I find someone else, and it's not the same with him?"

Jack examined her face for a long moment. He closed his eyes, and tilted his head just so much. Rosie thought maybe he understood.


	3. Chapter 3

"I have a story," he whispered, with his arms loose around her waist. "It will all make sense in a minute. Each police station is different. The building is different, the neighborhood is different, and the officers are different.”

“Like City West, I was there for maybe six weeks, a long time ago. It turns out that cells 6 and 7 share a wall with the DCI's office, so you always fill them last, and that goes double for drunks, and triple for drunks who sing off key. No one bothered to tell me, until I made the mistake. Anyway, I learned some new words from the DCI when he explained it to me.

"So," he continued, "any new staff at City South, we make a point to explain exactly how things need to be done. Doesn't matter how many years some senior constable has spent at another station, he gets the same instructions as the completely new cadet. We explain how it all works and what is expected."

"You don't have to go back to what the two of us were like when we first got married, when we didn't know what we were doing, or how it all worked." He pushed a lock of hair behind her ear and continued. Rosie saw a quick flash of a smile. 

"The thing is, now you know what you enjoy and what you need. Whatever he thinks he knows doesn’t matter." He was whispering in her ear, so she couldn't see his expression. "Whoever the lucky guy who replaces me, you need to tell him what you want, explain what you need."

Rosie felt her face heat. Conversation during sex hadn't really been a thing... Jack would touch her, or maybe whisper a suggestion, and she would smile yes, or shake her head no, or occasionally, when a climax was so close she could taste it, whimper "please, Jack!" and he would get closer, and slide deeper, and hold her even tighter until the magic happened. Who else would be able to make that work?

"Here are the rules," said the warm voice in her ear. "I'm here for whatever you want. But you need to tell me, in detail, what I touch, what I kiss, what I penetrate."

"Jack!" The idea of being so direct was terrifying. "I can't do that!"

"What makes you so sure? You have always been ready to tell me to leave my muddy shoes at the door, how is this different?" His hand was warm at the base of her spine.

"It is." 

"You want different," he observed, gesturing at the bed and its lumpy duvet. "Here you are in a strange hotel room, with this 'Mr. Robinson' guy you met for lunch. Tell him what you want. Do you want a ride back to the train station?"

"No," she insisted with some force, although she wasn't quite sure what she did want. 

"I'll wait until you think of something, 'Mrs. Robinson.'" Jack moved his arms to rest on the chair, and leaned back with an obnoxious smirk.

_Well that isn't getting me anywhere_ , she thought. Jack's calm was, as a rule, difficult to shake. Although, according to his rules... "Take off your clothes, Mr. Robinson." Rosie indulged in a smirk of her own.

"Of course." Jack nodded, his face now blank. "You will have to climb off my lap." 

Both of them stood up. When he went to hang shirt and trousers next to the rest of it, she sat down again, with some trepidation, on the edge of the bed.

He undressed facing the wall, and hung the various pieces of clothing as if they were back home in the bedroom of their bungalow. Rosie was happy that he hadn't acquired any new injuries since she last saw him, but he was even more lean, and she had a sudden and probably inappropriate urge to make breakfast for him. _He would have told me if he got hurt, wouldn't he?_

He sat down next to her, a hand's width away. She could hear her pulse in her ears. She could smell him, but she couldn't read his expression. 

"Well, Mrs. Robinson?" He did smirk remarkably well.

_God. Remember to breathe._ "Kiss me." 

He put an arm around her shoulders, and did so, thoroughly. 

_It is getting quite warm, here_ , she thought.

"Help me get my clothes off." 

He nodded, made no comment, and soon both of them were bare.

Rosie took a deep breath, grasped his hand and pulled the both of them down to the bed. "Make love to me, Mr. Robinson."

Jack was on top of her, weight on his elbows, just like always, just like last time. 

She felt him tense, frozen in place. His hands slid under her shoulders, and he rolled sideways, bringing her to the top. "Show me how you like it, Mrs. Robinson."

_Well, this is awkward_ , she thought. She had never realized quite how tough and bony the man was, and she felt unbalanced. One knee to the mattress on each side of his hips helped steady her, and she sat up.

Jack looked her up and down. 

She watched Jack’s hand toy with his penis. Suddenly, she realized that the magic trick didn’t always work the same way. _That is growing larger._

“See something you want, Mrs. Robinson?” asked Jack.

She looked up at his face and realized that he’d been watching her watch him. _So much for ladylike._

“Yes,” she sighed. “I want that very much.”

His hands went to her hips. “Come and get it.”

...

The manager was now behind the desk, and the clerk had sprinted up the back stairs, and was now tiptoeing along the 2nd floor carpet. Past 203, 205, 207...

"Mr. Robinson," said the woman's voice, "I did not tell you to stop!"

The man's laughter was somewhat muffled by the door. 

The clerk could hear the movement of the bed as the two shifted position.

"Is this what you came here for?"

"Yes, I came here to fuck you." Her voice was hoarse, breathless. “Don’t stop!”

"I hope you won't be disappointed, Mrs. Robinson."

Her words after that didn't make much sense, but the clerk understood that she wasn't at all disappointed in the grim-faced man who might or might not be a policeman. It was time to go home and let the hotel guests get on with whatever sordid business they were conducting in room 207.

...

Jack lay sprawled on the bed, eyes closed. Rosie reclined next to him and watched him breathe. She put her hand on the muscles of his shoulder and one eye flicked open in surprise.

She slowly slid her hand down his arm. "Are you alright?"

He rolled his head towards her, not putting in the effort to lift it off the pillow. He blinked at her several times and let out a long breath. "That's possibly three different questions. Which one do you want me to answer?"

"All of them," she replied, wondering what Jack was trying to evade.

"Physically, I'm fine. You didn't hurt me. Not even my dignity." Rosie didn't blink, so she saw the smile.

"And question two? What question is that?" 

"It's remarkably stimulating and very flattering when the lady decides to do all the work. A man could get used to that." His smile reminded her of what they say about the cat and the cream.

"And?" she insisted.

"Rosie? What train were you planning to catch?"

"The one at three twenty. Otherwise I have to wait until late."

He waved his watch in front of his face. "We'd better get moving." 


	4. Chapter 4

The two of them stood on the platform, at the train station. 

"What do I tell my sister?" asked Rosie, suddenly.

Jack touched her arm, turned her to face him. "I would think," he said softly, "that this is a matter to be kept between Mr. and Mrs. Robinson."

His expression was tense .. maybe she had sometimes been too quick to take things to her family.

"If you must," he continued, his eyes narrow, "tell her we talked about getting back together, and that you felt sorry for me."

"I was feeling sorry for myself." 

"Nothing has changed, Rosie. I'm still working too much, not sleeping enough. Probably drinking too much. I don't know anymore." He looked away, down the track.

"Jack," she said, but couldn't figure out how to complete the sentence.


End file.
